How COVID-19 has impacted the meat industry — and why the 'barbecue capital of the world' believes it will rebound

On a breezy morning back in early April, inside the Kansas City-area home where he pays his bills by serving finger-licking good food, Terry Hyer walked into his kitchen and heard something on TV that drummed up uneasiness in his barbecue-loving soul. There were meat-packing plant closures in Iowa, the newscast said, all due to the percolating COVID-19 pandemic. And Hyer, the amiable chief operations officer and partner at Zarda BBQ in Kansas City, let out a sigh. “And I thought, ‘Uh, oh,” he said. Hyer, 55, has been in the barbecue business 40 years now, long enough to know what the closings meant. If the coronavirus was spreading badly enough to shut down a few meat-packing plants one state away, others would almost certainly follow. The tight quarters and grueling work virtually guaranteed it. So when the United States surpassed 30 plant closures this month — including some in Missouri and Kansas — Hyer wasn’t surprised. “With that many plant closures, supply disruption was inevitable,” Hyer said. “This is our lifeblood.” That’s been a major problem in Kansas City, the self-proclaimed barbecue capital of the world, where several restaurant owners who spoke to Yahoo this week explained what it was like to fight for dollars and, in some cases, survival amid the pandemic. Coronavirus Fantasy NFL NBA MLB MMA NASCAR Golf Sportsbook Videos Podcasts NHL NCAAF Soccer NCAAB Tennis Boxing Cricket WNBA NCAAW Indycar Motorsports Horse Racing Cycling Rivals Shop Help Jobs RSS Tickets COVID-19 Sport Updates Trivia This Day in Sports Advertisement How COVID-19 has impacted the meat industry — and why the 'barbecue capital of the world' believes it will rebound Terez Paylor Senior NFL writer Yahoo SportsMay 23, 2020, 12:19 PM Yahoo Newsletter Get all the sports news you need, direct to your inbox. Email Address By subscribing, you are agreeing to Yahoo's Terms and Privacy Policy Scroll back up to restore default view. KANSAS CITY, Mo. — On a breezy morning back in early April, inside the Kansas City-area home where he pays his bills by serving finger-licking good food, Terry Hyer walked into his kitchen and heard something on TV that drummed up uneasiness in his barbecue-loving soul. There were meat-packing plant closures in Iowa, the newscast said, all due to the percolating COVID-19 pandemic. And Hyer, the amiable chief operations officer and partner at Zarda BBQ in Kansas City, let out a sigh. “And I thought, ‘Uh, oh,” he said. Hyer, 55, has been in the barbecue business 40 years now, long enough to know what the closings meant. If the coronavirus was spreading badly enough to shut down a few meat-packing plants one state away, others would almost certainly follow. The tight quarters and grueling work virtually guaranteed it. So when the United States surpassed 30 plant closures this month — including some in Missouri and Kansas — Hyer wasn’t surprised. “With that many plant closures, supply disruption was inevitable,” Hyer said. “This is our lifeblood.” That’s been a major problem in Kansas City, the self-proclaimed barbecue capital of the world, where several restaurant owners who spoke to Yahoo this week explained what it was like to fight for dollars and, in some cases, survival amid the pandemic. “Grocery stores, retail stores that provide essential items, those guys have seen a boom,” said Joe Pearce, who co-owns the popular Slap’s BBQ in Kansas City, Kansas, with his brother Mike. “They can’t keep enough staff, hire enough staff, keep the doors open long enough. “Then you have restaurants like mine, that are struggling everyday to keep the employees paid.” While the meat shortage has raged onward, spurred by a variety of factors that have conspired to cause a domino effect, many of those same Kansas City restaurateurs have reasons for optimism for things turning around this summer. But there’s also an understanding there’s still much that they cannot control. The meat-packing plants’ inability to process normal amounts of meat has led to two primary consequences. One, the ranchers who sell live animals to them are getting squeezed because they suddenly have more product than the meat-packing plants can buy. This is costing the ranchers money, since there’s a cost to feeding every animal, and many then choose to dispose of the animal via euthanasia. And two, you have the restaurateurs, who are seeing prices surge for the most premium proteins they want to buy — like brisket, a Kansas City staple — because the supply of processed meat has decreased, despite the fact there’s no shortage of live animals. “We’ve seen briskets go, in a very short period of time, from $1.99 a pound to over $6,” Mies said. “If you take the raw material cost from $1.99 to $6, you’ve taken [restaurants] from a position of making money to a position of where they may be selling that brisket sandwich and losing money.” “We have seen that everybody in the supply chain is having an extremely difficult time,” said Ricky Paradise, the president of Jack Stack BBQ, another popular Kansas City restaurant. “We don’t see any winners in the process — we see everybody feeling the burden of COVID-19. It’s unprecedented.” Why is there a meat shortage in Kansas City when livestock is plentiful? Mark Mies is one of the owners of Mies Family Foods, a second-generation wholesale meat supplier based in North Kansas City. You may not know who he is, but your favorite restaurant likely knows someone like him. After ranchers raise the cow — or pig, or chicken, or whatever meat you’re eating — for a certain period of time, they then sell the animals to a processing plant, which slaughters and packages them. After that, meat suppliers like Mies come into the fold, buying the product in bulk, then turning around and selling it (along with everything else that any self-respecting restaurateur might need), essentially making them a one-stop shop. That’s the cycle. But when you throw a wrench into the machine like a pandemic, things can get out of whack quickly, even if only one part of the machine gets gummed up. And in this instance, it’s happening at the meat-packing plants, where multiple COVID-19 outbreaks across the country have either caused outright closures or, at best, diminished capacity, as many are operating with a fewer workers and enhanced safety measures. “It takes a certain amount of employees to take that animal and get it in a box,” Mies explained. “And beyond that, when you want value-added items like boneless loins, St. Louis-style spare ribs … that all takes extra labor that most of these plants haven’t had. So a lot of that value-added product, especially on the pork side, we’ve not had for weeks. It’s just not been available.”...MORE